Gamification e game-based learning: uma abordagem lúdica à aprendizagem

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Ensino de Informática

Desenvolvimento do pensamento computacional com recurso ao Scratch: uma experiência com alunos do 8ºano

Relatório de estágio de mestrado em Ensino de Informática

Anàlisi de models d'ensenyament-aprenentatge de competències no tècniques als estudis d'Enginyeria en informàtica

Actualment a l'Estat espanyol s'està implantant el Pla Bolonya per incorporar-se a l'Espai Europeu d'Estudis Superiors (l'EEES). Com a un dels principals objectius, l'EEES pretén homogeneïtzar els estudis i de manera concreta les competències adquirides per qualsevol estudiant independentment d'on hagi realitzat els seus estudis. Per això, existeixen iniciatives europees (com el projecte Tuning) que treballen per definir competències per a totes les titulacions universitàries.El projecte presenta l'anàlisi realitzat sobre vint Universitats de diferents continents per identificar models d'ensenyament-aprenentatge de competències no tècniques. La recerca es centra addicionalment en la competència comunicativa escrita.La font principal de dades ha estat la informació proporcionada a les pàgines Web de les universitats i molt especialment els seus plans d'estudi.

Aplicación web para el inventario de presiones en ríos con CARTODB

Este TFC se ha realizado como última asignatura de la carrera de Ingeniería Técnica en Informática de Gestión, dentro del área de Sistemas de Información Geográfica.

Traducción técnica del capítulo III del libro Advanced Data Warehouse design: from conventional to spatial and temporal applications

The proposal to work on this final project came after several discussions held with Dr. Elzbieta Malinowski Gadja, who in 2008 published the book entitled Advanced Data Warehouse Design: From Conventional to Spatial and Temporal Applications (Data-Centric Systems and Applications). The project was carried out under the technical supervision of Dr. Malinowski and the direct beneficiary was the University of Costa Rica (UCR) where Dr. Malinowski is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Informatics. The purpose of this project was twofold: First, to translate chapter III of said book with the intention of generating educational material for the use of the UCR and, second, to venture in the field of technical translation related to data warehouse. For the first component, the goal was to generate a final product that would eventually serve as an educational tool for the post-graduate courses of the UCR. For the second component, this project allowed me to acquire new skills and put into practice techniques that have helped me not only to perfom better in my current job as an Assistant Translator of the Inter-American BAnk (IDB), but also to use them in similar projects. The process was lenggthy and required torough research and constant communication with the author. The investigation focused on the search of terms and definitions to prepare the glossary, which was the basis to start the translation project. The translation process itself was carried out by phases, so that comments and corrections by the author could be taken into account in subsequent stages. Later, based on the glossary and the translated text, illustrations had been created in the Visio software were translated. In addition to the technical revision by the author, professor Carme Mangiron was in charge of revising the non-technical text. The result was a high-quality document that is currently used as reference and study material by the Department of Computer Science and Informatics of Costa Rica.

Normalisation informatique et marchés de services : le cas du XML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a generic computing language that provides an outstanding case study of commodification of service standards. The development of this language in the late 1990s marked a shift in computer science as its extensibility let store and share any kind of data. Many office suites software rely on it. The chapter highlights how the largest multinational firms pay special attention to gain a recognised international standard for such a major technological innovation. It argues that standardisation processes affects market structures and can lead to market capture. By examining how a strategic use of standardisation arenas can generate profits, it shows that Microsoft succeeded in making its own technical solution a recognised ISO standard in 2008, while the same arena already adopted two years earlier the open source standard set by IBM and Sun Microsystems. Yet XML standardisation also helped to establish a distinct model of information technology services at the expense of Microsoft monopoly on proprietary software

Localitzador gràfic d'adreces IP

Internet s'ha convertit en una font extraordinària de recursos per una audiència en constant creixement arreu el món. A l'igual que en altres activitats de la nostra societat, el coneixement de la localització geogràfica d'aquests recursos i de la gent que hi accedeix és útil tant pels usuaris com pels proveïdors d'informació. La geolocalització IP, però, pot donar informació errònia o amb un nivell de precisió que no vagi més enllà de la referència a un país.Aquest treball recull els diferents actors que formen part de la geolocalització IP i s'ha analitzat el paper que juguen en aquest procés així com la seva influència en el nivell de fiabilitat i exactitud final. Amb aquests sòlids fonaments s'ha desenvolupat una aplicació per representar gràficament en un mapa la geolocalització IP d'un dispositiu i la dels nodes que formen el camí realitzat fins arribar-hi, així com tota la informació addicional que de cada IP s'ha pogut obtenir.El resultat ha estat una memòria tècnica de tot el treball de recerca juntament amb una aplicació que s'executa en l'entorn de Microsoft Windows i plataforma .NET, caracteritzada per la seva facilitat d'ús gràcies a un disseny simple molt intuïtiu i efectiu, la rapidesa d'execució per què aprofita la programació de fils, i un positiu impacte visual ja que fa servir l'API de Google Maps per a la representació visual de la traça.

Informàtica sense computadors

Aquesta memòria descriu un procés d’ensenyament dels conceptes importants de l’informàtica a nois de 10-12 anys a partir de activitats divertides i senzilles sense utilitzar ordinadors. Es pretén cobrir una necessitat actual que és fomentar l’ interès per a l'enginyeria, ja el número d’estudiants interessats decreix a nivell mundial. A partir d’un projecte pedagògic paral·lel en anglès es va subtitular en català el vídeo de CSUnplugged, associació australiana que aporta les idees i propòsits per la creació del nostre. Aquesta subtitulació junt amb les activitats que al vídeo es representen han fet un projecte educatiu que creua etapes i coneixements.

Python as a programming language for the introductory programming courses

Tämä kandidaatintyö tutkii tietotekniikan perusopetuksessa keskeisen aiheen,ohjelmoinnin, alkeisopetusta ja siihen liittyviä ongelmia. Työssä perehdytään ohjelmoinnin perusopetusmenetelmiin ja opetuksen lähestymistapoihin, sekä ratkaisuihin, joilla opetusta voidaan tehostaa. Näitä ratkaisuja työssä ovat mm. ohjelmointikielen valinta, käytettävän kehitysympäristön löytäminen sekä kurssia tukevien opetusapuvälineiden etsiminen. Lisäksi kurssin läpivientiin liittyvien toimintojen, kuten harjoitusten ja mahdollisten viikkotehtävien valinta kuuluu osaksitätä työtä. Työ itsessään lähestyy aihetta tutkimalla Pythonin soveltuvuutta ohjelmoinnin alkeisopetukseen mm. vertailemalla sitä muihin olemassa oleviin yleisiin opetuskieliin, kuten C, C++ tai Java. Se tarkastelee kielen hyviä ja huonoja puolia, sekä tutkii, voidaanko Pythonia hyödyntää luontevasti pääasiallisena opetuskielenä. Lisäksi työ perehtyy siihen, mitä kaikkea kurssilla tulisi opettaa, sekä siihen, kuinka kurssin läpivienti olisi tehokkainta toteuttaa ja minkälaiset tekniset puitteet kurssin toteuttamista varten olisi järkevää valita.

On Transmission System Design for Wireless Broadcasting

This thesis considers aspects related to the design and standardisation of transmission systems for wireless broadcasting, comprising terrestrial and mobile reception. The purpose is to identify which factors influence the technical decisions and what issues could be better considered in the design process in order to assess different use cases, service scenarios and end-user quality. Further, the necessity of cross-layer optimisation for efficient data transmission is emphasised and means to take this into consideration are suggested. The work is mainly related terrestrial and mobile digital video broadcasting systems but many of the findings can be generalised also to other transmission systems and design processes. The work has led to three main conclusions. First, it is discovered that there are no sufficiently accurate error criteria for measuring the subjective perceived audiovisual quality that could be utilised in transmission system design. Means for designing new error criteria for mobile TV (television) services are suggested and similar work related to other services is recommended. Second, it is suggested that in addition to commercial requirements there should be technical requirements setting the frame work for the design process of a new transmission system. The technical requirements should include the assessed reception conditions, technical quality of service and service functionalities. Reception conditions comprise radio channel models, receiver types and antenna types. Technical quality of service consists of bandwidth, timeliness and reliability. Of these, the thesis focuses on radio channel models and errorcriteria (reliability) as two of the most important design challenges and provides means to optimise transmission parameters based on these. Third, the thesis argues that the most favourable development for wireless broadcasting would be a single system suitable for all scenarios of wireless broadcasting. It is claimed that there are no major technical obstacles to achieve this and that the recently published second generation digital terrestrial television broadcasting system provides a good basis. The challenges and opportunities of a universal wireless broadcasting system are discussed mainly from technical but briefly also from commercial and regulatory aspect

Traducción técnica del capítulo III del libro Advanced Data Warehouse design: from conventional to spatial and temporal applications

The proposal to work on this final project came after several discussions held with Dr. Elzbieta Malinowski Gadja, who in 2008 published the book entitled Advanced Data Warehouse Design: From Conventional to Spatial and Temporal Applications (Data-Centric Systems and Applications). The project was carried out under the technical supervision of Dr. Malinowski and the direct beneficiary was the University of Costa Rica (UCR) where Dr. Malinowski is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Informatics. The purpose of this project was twofold: First, to translate chapter III of said book with the intention of generating educational material for the use of the UCR and, second, to venture in the field of technical translation related to data warehouse. For the first component, the goal was to generate a final product that would eventually serve as an educational tool for the post-graduate courses of the UCR. For the second component, this project allowed me to acquire new skills and put into practice techniques that have helped me not only to perfom better in my current job as an Assistant Translator of the Inter-American BAnk (IDB), but also to use them in similar projects. The process was lenggthy and required torough research and constant communication with the author. The investigation focused on the search of terms and definitions to prepare the glossary, which was the basis to start the translation project. The translation process itself was carried out by phases, so that comments and corrections by the author could be taken into account in subsequent stages. Later, based on the glossary and the translated text, illustrations had been created in the Visio software were translated. In addition to the technical revision by the author, professor Carme Mangiron was in charge of revising the non-technical text. The result was a high-quality document that is currently used as reference and study material by the Department of Computer Science and Informatics of Costa Rica.

On advancing business intelligence in the electricity retail market

In recent decades, business intelligence (BI) has gained momentum in real-world practice. At the same time, business intelligence has evolved as an important research subject of Information Systems (IS) within the decision support domain. Today’s growing competitive pressure in business has led to increased needs for real-time analytics, i.e., so called real-time BI or operational BI. This is especially true with respect to the electricity production, transmission, distribution, and retail business since the law of physics determines that electricity as a commodity is nearly impossible to be stored economically, and therefore demand-supply needs to be constantly in balance. The current power sector is subject to complex changes, innovation opportunities, and technical and regulatory constraints. These range from low carbon transition, renewable energy sources (RES) development, market design to new technologies (e.g., smart metering, smart grids, electric vehicles, etc.), and new independent power producers (e.g., commercial buildings or households with rooftop solar panel installments, a.k.a. Distributed Generation). Among them, the ongoing deployment of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) has profound impacts on the electricity retail market. From the view point of BI research, the AMI is enabling real-time or near real-time analytics in the electricity retail business. Following Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm in the IS field, this research presents four aspects of BI for efficient pricing in a competitive electricity retail market: (i) visual data-mining based descriptive analytics, namely electricity consumption profiling, for pricing decision-making support; (ii) real-time BI enterprise architecture for enhancing management’s capacity on real-time decision-making; (iii) prescriptive analytics through agent-based modeling for price-responsive demand simulation; (iv) visual data-mining application for electricity distribution benchmarking. Even though this study is from the perspective of the European electricity industry, particularly focused on Finland and Estonia, the BI approaches investigated can: (i) provide managerial implications to support the utility’s pricing decision-making; (ii) add empirical knowledge to the landscape of BI research; (iii) be transferred to a wide body of practice in the power sector and BI research community.

A Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm with Side Effect Machines for Motif Discovery

Understanding the machinery of gene regulation to control gene expression has been one of the main focuses of bioinformaticians for years. We use a multi-objective genetic algorithm to evolve a specialized version of side effect machines for degenerate motif discovery. We compare some suggested objectives for the motifs they find, test different multi-objective scoring schemes and probabilistic models for the background sequence models and report our results on a synthetic dataset and some biological benchmarking suites. We conclude with a comparison of our algorithm with some widely used motif discovery algorithms in the literature and suggest future directions for research in this area.

Inverse Illumination Design with Genetic Programming

Interior illumination is a complex problem involving numerous interacting factors. This research applies genetic programming towards problems in illumination design. The Radiance system is used for performing accurate illumination simulations. Radiance accounts for a number of important environmental factors, which we exploit during fitness evaluation. Illumination requirements include local illumination intensity from natural and artificial sources, colour, and uniformity. Evolved solutions incorporate design elements such as artificial lights, room materials, windows, and glass properties. A number of case studies are examined, including many-objective problems involving up to 7 illumination requirements, the design of a decorative wall of lights, and the creation of a stained-glass window for a large public space. Our results show the technical and creative possibilities of applying genetic programming to illumination design.